be quiet! Shadow Rock LP CPU Cooler Review

Overclocking with the Shadow Rock LP

Many of the previous tests we chose not to overclock beyond the turbo frequency in order to show you what your average user would see, but we did find the limits of this particular processor without going too extreme on the voltage and will start to include those results. The 4770k will be overclocked to a 4.3GHz turbo boost at 1.270 volts, which is over the stock 1.193v. To push this particular 4770k stably to 4.4GHz required well over 1.4 volts, which the performance gains of a 100MHz increase was not worth the risk from that huge bump in voltage. Also understand that every processor reacts differently to voltage adjustments, so some may run slightly cooler or hotter at this same overclock frequency.

I did not start overclocking the 4770k until after my Cooler Master Glacer 240L review, so not all coolers were tested under the increased stress of an overclock.

Again, ambient temperature at the time of testing is 74 degrees Fahrenheit. To record temperatures, we used Core Temp, logged the temperatures for 15 minutes or while each program was active, and averaged all 4 cores.

Now you might be asking where the Prime95 test is. I have opted to keep those results out as my CPU was already running at a fairly high temperature on the stock frequency. The overclock was not worth risking failure of my CPU to obtain a synthetic benchmark’s results. Instead, x264 will be a much better and realistic example of taxing a CPU heavily.

X264

3D Mark 2013

Metro Last Light

Sleeping Dogs

Overall Results: I did not expect a small cooler like this to respond very well to overclocking, but to my surprise it did pretty well in the gaming department. I wouldn’t bother stressing your CPU with an overclock for more demanding activities like video encoding, but gaming might be OK to an extent.